Vision Therapy Needed to Recognize Jesus’ Mighty Deeds

Perhaps your eyesight is not accustomed to recognizing miracles—mighty deeds—in your everyday life. Perhaps the notion of Jesus restoring your sight, healing you from paralysis or uncleanness, calming the storms of your life, or bringing you back from the dead is foreign to you. If so, you may wonder whether some sort of “vision therapy” is possible, some strategy for developing the ability to recognize God’s constant activity in your life. The answer is a resounding yes!

One very good way to begin vision therapy is to focus your “eyesight” on the following four areas of life and to ask yourself how God has revealed his presence to you in each of them.

• Significant people.

  Just as God spoke to his people through Moses and the prophets, God often speaks to us through other people. Who are the people in your life who have shaped and influenced you? Who are the people to whom you owe much?

• Moments of joy (big or small).

  Throughout Scripture, people who recognize encounters with God respond to them in terms of great joy. By reversing that process, we can come to recognize encounters with God, too. In other words, by reflecting on moments of joy, whether big or small, we can recognize God’s movement in our lives as the cause of those joy-filled moments.

• Peak moments of grace.

  In addition to all the little ways that God has manifested his presence to us, each of us can think of a handful of extraordinary moments in our lives when we felt we had come face-to-face with the infinite—moments when God’s presence was almost palpable. Perhaps it was a brush with death, a moment of incredible luck or fortune, a dramatic recovery from an unfortunate situation, or an extraordinary experience of beauty. Moments like these make us aware of a power greater than our own.

• Milestones in life.

  Each of us can name moments in our lives when we reached a major milestone—a graduation, a new job, a promotion, a birthday or anniversary, or a wedding day, for example. These events cause us to pause and express gratitude, and when we express gratitude, we are touching the Holy, the Giver of all good gifts.

Once you have engaged in this type of reflection and reminiscence and identified the myriad ways God has been active in your life, you can go back and identify which of these events have been experiences of the Lord healing you, providing sustenance for you, revealing his great power to you, and restoring you to life. Then you will be able to proclaim to others, as did the author of “Amazing Grace,” that “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”